What's On My Mind

Here we have the most dazzling and elaborate video I’ve ever made. It’s a high-speed excursion through a surreal funk world -- where every person, place, or thing is a continuous portal into future action. This is a true boogie utopia, where everything is as it should be: the good guy always gets the girl, and the girls all have serious, major, monumental, big time curves.

The characters that inhabit this funk zone were created by Matt Rowland, and before they were brought to life, they resided on the album cover for Back To Reality, a compilation of underground boogie hits by Tony Cook. Tony, by the way, played drums in James Brown’s band The J.B’s, and produced some of the most sublime and ingenious funk of the 80s; The song’s vocalist is Dam-Funk, a modern funk mastermind himself. I’m a huge fan of both artists, as well as everything that Stones Throw Records puts out -- so it was a real treat to be asked to do the video for them. An iconic label of international esteem, Stones Throw personifies all things eclectic and creative, and I’m very excited about having some of my work figure into that equation somewhere, not to mention the exposure. It was only a couple years ago when I was just trying to figure out how to make music videos, and one of my earliest experiments happened to involve Tony Cook’s music, before Stones Throw reissued his catalog, and before I had substantial editing skills. Coming full circle, sort of like the video.

Now I’m gonna take you behind the scenes! Some of the theatrical concepts were predesigned, but it’s mostly organic silliness that I jury-rigged as I went. I used a mix of found footage and original animations -- the animations were hand-drawn, scanned, and sequence old-school style, while the other characters and backdrops were repurposed and re-animated, so to speak. A very wide variety of sources were involved in making this hodgepodge, and when you break down all the individual frames and little images, we’re talking over 700 files going into this bad boy!